Microsoft and Yahoo struck a long-anticipated search deal Wednesday under which Microsoft's Bing search engine will power Yahoo's search site, and Yahoo will sell premium search advertising services for both companies.

According to the companies, the combined forces of the their search teams and assets will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation to make them more competitive players in the search market.

The deal comes about two months after Microsoft revamped its search engine and relaunched it as Bing, which has already been taking share from Yahoo's search engine and has gotten early positive user reviews, according to analysts' statistics. For its part, Yahoo has a larger network of advertisers than Microsoft, and Microsoft will benefit now by having access to them.

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